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10 Wicked Cool Boston Startups You Should Know

If someone asks you to name a U.S. city associated with tech startups, chances are you'll start your list with San Francisco or New York, but probably not Boston.

It's the city where Facebook and Dropbox were born. It's a city with top universities like Harvard and MIT, and one of the highest rates of venture capital investment in tech companies. And it's a city whose reputation for tech is frequently overshadowed by others.

"Boston is a city known for enterprise software," says Paul English, co-founder of Kayak, the travel search site that was acquired by Priceline for $1.8 billion in 2012. "It's produced some good hardware and security software companies, but there just haven't been a lot of consumer [-focused companies]." He adds, "If I were to look on your iPhone right now, probably most of the apps were developed in California, which really has become the Mecca. It's a hugely powerful ecosystem, and that doesn't exist in Boston."

English is working to change that now with the launch of a new incubator called Blade, which focuses on funding and fostering startups in the Boston area. The incubator isn't the only news that may shift the perception of Boston's tech scene: Care.com, a Boston area startup, went public in January, and Wayfair, another Boston-based tech company, is expected to go public later this year.

There have also been a few notable acquisitions of Boston startups in the past year. Google recently bought Boston Dynamics, a robotics company. Dropbox returned to its roots and acquired Sold in November; and Twitter bought Crashlytics and Bluefin Labs, located in the same building in Boston, and a third startup in the area a few months later.

The current crop of startups in the Boston area range from health services to travel to robotics. Here are a few that are worth keeping an eye on.

1. Circle

Jeremy Allaire spent much of the past decade helping to build up Brightcove, an online video platform, into one of Boston's more successful tech startups. Late last year, Allaire decided to launch a new startup called Circle "about a block and a half" from Brightcove's office in Boston.

With Circle, Allaire is trying to bring bitcoin — and digital currency more broadly — into the mainstream by building products to make it easier for consumers and merchants to accept the currency without the pain of understanding cryptography. The startup is still in its early days, but it has raised $9 million.

2. Mobee

A little more than a year ago, a team of former Google employees launched Mobee to give retailers a new way to get insights from customers. The startup bills its app as a kind of mystery shopping service: Users are rewarded with cash or gift cards for running various "missions" reviewing stores. Those results are then supplied to businesses.

"Companies come to us to get the data that they want to know about their stores," Prahar Shah, the startup's founder and CEO, told Mashable in an interview late last year. "We sort of are the eyes and ears for them."

Mobee recently acquired Kickscout, an ecommerce service, and is expanding outside Boston to become a nationwide service.

3. Runkeeper

Runkeeper is proof that Boston startups can and do build popular apps. The fitness app, which lets users track their runs, bike rides and more, launched in 2009 and has since attracted nearly 30 million users. The app has also been praised by another one-time Boston resident, Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

FitnessKeeper, the company behind Runkeeper, has raised $11.5 million to date and is based in Boston proper. As it so happens, the company was cofounded by Michael Sheeley, who later left to start Kickscout and now works for Mobee. Boston is a small world, sometimes.

4. Cannonball

During the past year, a number of startups tried to rethink email for mobile. Cannonball, a startup based in Cambridge, took a slightly different approach by focusing on tablets and ignoring the emphasis on getting to "inbox zero."

Cannonball's app, released in October, has one column that consists of tiles that group emails by sender in addition to the traditional column of incoming mail. The app also offers options to eliminate your unread emails in bulk.

"I'm the guy with 20,000 messages in his inbox," Jim Caralis, cofounder of Cannonball, told Mashable in an earlier interview. "I'm also the guy who, prior to this product, had 2,000 unread messages in my inbox." That latter issue is what Cannonball hopes to fix.

5. Rethink Robotics

Google may have acquired Boston Dynamics, but there are other notable robotics companies in the Boston area. Rethink Robotics develops robots (see video above) for research and manufacturing. The company was founded by Rodney Brooks, who previously founded iRobot. Rethink Robotics has raised more than $80 million to date and counts Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos as one of its first investors.

6. Localytics

Mobile analytics may not be quite as sexy as some of the other areas that startups on this list are focused on, but it is a competitive space. Facebook acquired Onavo late last year for $120 million and Apple recently bought Burstly, which offered an analytics service, among other features.

Right near Boston Common, you'll find Localytics, another notable company in this space, which offers mobile analytics and marketing for publishers. The startup has raised nearly $25 million in funding to date, including a $16 million round of funding earlier this year.

7. TalkTo

If the measure of a good startup is how well it solves a common pain point, then TalkTo ranks high among the Boston startups on this list. TalkTo lets users text questions to millions of businesses in the U.S. and Canada so you don't have to go through the hassle of searching for numbers and calling customer service. You can also view the responses that nearby businesses offer to other users, which may answer your own question.

The Cambridge startup launched its app in late 2011 and has raised $3 million in funding.

8. Spritz

Feel like this article is taking awhile to read? Spritz aims to change that.

The Boston-based startup launched a service last week during Mobile World Congress, which promises to change the way we read and make it possible for users to consume as much as 1,000 words per minute. The app displays one word at a time and uses lines and markers to direct the user's attention to specific letters in each word.

Spritz attracted more than one million users in its first week.

9. Leaf

Square got its start in St. Louis, but then the company moved its operations to San Francisco. Leaf, another commerce app, got its start in the Boston area and stayed put.

Leaf launched two years ago and provides point-of-sale tools for bricks-and-mortar merchants, similar to what Square offers. The startup is headquartered near MIT's campus and recently raised a $20 million round of funding.

10. PlateJoy

PlateJoy simplifies the process of planning out weekly meals for your family. All you have to do is tell the service some basic details about your family size and dietary preferences; then PlateJoy will recommend recipes and deliver the ingredients within 24 hours.

"We have an awesome team of recipe curators and developers who find the best recipes out there and then tweak them to make them tastier, easier to prepare, and in alignment with any given user’s preferences," Christina Bognet, cofounder of PlateJoy, told Mashable in an earlier interview. The startup is based in Cambridge.

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